In this round, Bruce has time to really dive into the couple of aspects of the import that were not working, and tries to address them through some XSL judo. Judging by the end-product screenshots he’s posted, he did a pretty good job at that. The main issues were around losing lanes and XY coordinate mapping.

Bruce was generous enough to not only share the narrative of his efforts, but to share the end-product XSL as well (link available on his blog posting). I think it shows (a) how close we are to real BPMN-level portability, (b) the fact that products still have a ways to go to support it properly (really, I have to write XSL to convert the models!?), and (c) how much harder accurate portable execution models would be given that these tools have different ideas about how steps in the process should be executed…

Thanks again Bruce!

UPDATE: Bruce has an update on the model portability issues based on Diagram Interchange (DI) and BPMN 2.0. He points out that some of the decisions made for supporting diagram interchange make it impractical to implement, despite being technically possible. As usual, he provides good insight into the standards process for BPMN, and exposes some of the warts in the outcomes – hopefully it will result in some remedies in minor revisions to the specification.